What are npm, bower, gulp, Yeoman, and grunt good for?

Question

I\'m a backend developer, and slightly confused by npm, bower, gulp, grunt, and Yeoman. Whenever I ask someone what their purpose is, the answer tends to boil down to depend

Answer 1

I added some details:

npm is a package manager for javascript, npm is nodejs's package ecosystem, but it can be used only for front-end projects.

grunt & gulp are useful to separate and automate tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing on command line, it's a way lighter solution than (for example) visual studio as the process is only a separated (and usually lightweight) command line/process.

Regarding the differences between gulp, grunt and bower there is already a ticket: What are the differences between Grunt, Gulp.js and Bower? Why & when to use them?

Nodejs is more a javascript runtime. Node.js allows the creation of web servers and networking tools using js and a collection of "modules" that handle various core functionality and other core functions. Source

This ticket resumes the differences between Git and Subversion: Why is Git better than Subversion?